Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (69 page)

Competing national groups across Europe routinely promote their own statistics and denigrate those of their rivals with little regard for the probable reality. Thus the generally accepted number of 60-90,000 Poles killed by Ukrainian nationalists during the war is often ignored by ‘historians’ from both sides: Poles multiply the number by five, and Ukrainians divide it by five.
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Likewise, Serbs have historically always inflated their wartime death toll by some 700,000; while Croats similarly inflate the number killed by the Yugoslav state after the war was over.
¹¹
Political factions in the West are equally happy to use spurious statistics. For decades the French right wing told stories about 105,000 Vichyites murdered in cold blood by the Resistance after the war. The accepted figure now is actually just a few thousand.
¹²
So widespread are these bogus figures that even serious historians occasionally repeat them, thus propagating them still further.

If such myths and false figures promote antagonism amongst relatively small national and political minorities, they are even more insidious when they begin to seep into the mainstream. Since the end of the twentieth century the whole of Europe has experienced a marked shift to the right, with far-right groups gaining more influence than at any time since the Second World War. These groups are attempting to shift the onus of blame away from the Nazis and Fascists who set the whole cycle of atrocity and counter-atrocity in motion, and towards their left-wing rivals. But when the far right begins to promote a specific view of history we should be just as cautious as we have become accustomed to being when the Communists do the same.

An example of how history has been manipulated for political gain occurred in Italy in 2005, when government ministers announced a brand-new national day of remembrance. The events they wished to commemorate had occurred in 1945, when the borderlands in the north-east of the country had been overrun by Yugoslav Partisans. In a frenzy of ethnic cleansing similar to what was happening in other parts of Yugoslavia, thousands of Italian civilians were massacred or thrown alive into the region’s deep natural chasms. To mark the sixtieth anniversary of these events, and also the anniversary of the treaty which signed over the north-eastern corner of the country to Yugoslavia, the authorities planned to hold a series of commemoration ceremonies. One of these ceremonies took place in Trieste, near the border, which had been the scene of some of the Yugoslav atrocities. Controversially, it was attended by Italy’s Foreign Minister, Gianfranco Fini, whose political party – the National Alliance – was the successor to the postwar neo-Fascist movement.

In a speech on the official day of remembrance, the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, told his country, ‘If we look back to the twentieth century we see pages of history we’d prefer to forget. But we cannot and should not forget.’
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By invoking history in this way, however, the Italian government was being extremely selective in what it was choosing to remember. Thousands of Italians were indeed massacred by Yugoslavian Partisans in 1945 — but one needed only to look back a further four years to see that it had not been the Yugoslavs or the Communists who had set the process in motion. It was the Italian Fascists who had invaded Yugoslavia in the first place, who had committed the first atrocities, and who had installed the Ustashas – one of the most repulsive regimes in wartime Europe – in power.

In fact, the commemoration had nothing to do with ‘history’ and a lot to do with politics. At a time when Italy was becoming increasingly sensitive about immigration from eastern Europe, it suited Italian nationalists to portray their Slav neighbours as villains. But it was more than just an attempt to demonize foreigners. The whole event, which came barely a week after the international commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz, was a deliberate attempt to provide Italy with its own homegrown holocaust. Italians were casting themselves as the victims, and their next-door neighbours as the perpetrators of atrocity. Just as importantly, especially from Gianfranco Fini’s point of view, it challenged the traditional emphasis on the Italian people being the victims of Fascist atrocities. The villains in this commemoration were not from the political right, but from the left. It was a subtle way of shifting the blame for the events of the war away from Gianfranco Fini’s predecessors, the Italian Fascists.
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Some historians have suggested that hatreds and rivalries between Europe’s competing national and political groups will always exist as long as we continue to commemorate the events of the war and its immediate aftermath. The commemoration in 2005 certainly did nothing to promote friendly relations with Italy’s north-eastern neighbours. Perhaps George Santayana’s famous aphorism that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ should be reversed – that is, it is
because
we remember the past that we are condemned to repeat it. The depressing re-emergence of national hatreds in the last two decades might seem to suggest so.
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If I truly believed remembrance to be the cause of continuing hatred, however, then I would never have written this book. To rake over the old coals of war, to repeat the very stories that are the source of so many antagonisms, would have been irresponsible in the extreme. If one follows the logic of this argument, there should be no books about this period at all, nor any newspaper articles, films or TV documentaries – the transmission of these stories from one generation to another becomes nothing better than the repetition of a vicious cycle. Remembrance, and even memory itself, becomes a sin – the only virtuous policy would be one of deliberate forgetting.

But forgetting is not an option. To begin with, events on the scale described in this book are impossible to forget. As the various efforts by the Communists to repress cultural memory during the Cold War have demonstrated, attempts to forget the past merely lead to further resentment, and ultimately to a dangerous distortion of the facts. Distorted facts are far more dangerous than actual ones. But neither should we want to forget. The events that have formed the world around us, and that continue to shape the world today, are important not only to historians but to everyone. It is our memory of the past that makes us who we are, not only on a national level but also on an intensely personal one.

The immediate postwar period is one of the most important times in our recent history. If the Second World War destroyed the old continent, then its immediate aftermath was the protean chaos out of which the new Europe was formed. It was during this violent, vengeful time that many of our hopes, aspirations, prejudices and resentments first took shape. Anyone who truly wants to understand Europe as it is today must first have an understanding of what occurred here during this crucial formative period. There is no value in shying away from difficult or sensitive themes, since these are the very building blocks upon which the modern Europe has been built.

It is not our remembering the sins of the past that provokes hatred, but the way in which we remember them. The immediate postwar period has been routinely neglected, misremembered and misused by all of us. Berlusconi and Fini’s version of history omits any serious acknowledgement of Italian wrongdoing; the Crimean Tatar view of history glosses over their people’s collaboration with the Nazis; the German expellees try to present the history of their own suffering as equivalent to the suffering of the Jews.

Those who wish to harness hatred and resentment for their own gain always try to distort the proper balance between one version of history and another. They take events out of context; they make blame a one-sided game; and they try to convince us that historical problems are the problems of today. If we are to bring an end to the cycle of hatred and violence we must do precisely the opposite of these things. We must show how competing views of history can exist alongside one another. We must show how past atrocities fit into their historical context, and how blame necessarily attaches itself not just to one party, but to a whole variety of parties. We must strive always to discover the truth, particularly when it comes to statistics, and then put that truth to bed. It is, after all, history, and should not be allowed to poison the present.

Despite the many depressing examples of how history has been used to resurrect old hatreds, there are also symbols of hope. Amongst the many examples I could cite, I will choose one – that of the relationship between Germany and Poland. In the aftermath of the war the hatred between Germans and Poles seemed permanent and irreversible. The Poles loathed the nation that had ravaged their country, murdered millions of its civilians and created a string of concentration camps – perhaps the most potent symbols of evil in the entire twentieth century – on Polish territory. The Germans in return felt bitter about the ‘Slavic’ brutality that saw the rape and murder of millions of
their
civilians, the looting of their homes and farms in Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia, and the removal of thousands of square miles of German territory, which was handed over by the international community to Poland.

In 1965, however, the Polish bishops made an offer of reconciliation and forgiveness to Germany. In 1970 a treaty was drawn up between Poland and West Germany. Millions of Poles were allowed to visit their near neighbour and discover for themselves what ordinary Germans were like. A Polish-German commission was set up to revise history textbooks, to correct inaccurate statistics and to prevent historical episodes from being overtly manipulated for political reasons. The events of the past were not forgotten, but they were put within their proper context. Today Germans and Poles generally regard one another’s nations as friendly. Residual hatreds tend to be confined to small groups only – the expellees on one side, and the older generations of Poles on the other. Both of these groups are now dying out, or losing ground with the passage of time.

For most young people in both Poland and Germany, the events of the war and its immediate aftermath are no longer much of an issue. National rivalries may still come to life occasionally for the duration of a football match, but chants and slogans of Polish and German football fans are generally just as sporting as the football itself. As for
real
hatred – the sort that used to be demanded as a duty by political commissars and war veterans – that is now regarded by most young people as little more than ancient history.
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Note on Place Names

The map of Europe changed considerably in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the names of towns and cities changed with it. Thus, for example, the German city of Stettin became the Polish city of Szczecin, Polish Wilno became Lithuanian Vilnius and Italian Fiume became Yugoslavian Rijeka.

Except where there is an established English name for a city, I have tried always to use place names as they would generally have been accepted at the time. Thus, I have used Stettin when recounting events there during the war, but Szczecin when describing later events. Similarly I have given Russian names for Ukrainian cities like Kharkov or Dnepropetrovsk because, as part of the Soviet Union, this is how they were always referred to in contemporary documents.

There were, and still are, strong nationalist intentions behind the names given to towns, particularly in sensitive border areas. I would like to reassure the reader that these are not necessarily sentiments that I share.

1. Territorial changes in Europe, 1945 – 7

ALSO BY KEITH LOWE

Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg 1943

Acknowledgements

The research for this book has been a monumental task, and could never have been accomplished without a vast amount of help from individuals and institutions across Europe. I am deeply grateful to the K. Blundell Trust for the generous grant which allowed me to pay for a significant part of my research. I am particularly indebted to Joanna Pylat, Barbara Herchenreder, Kasia Piekarska, Irena Kolar and Anna Pleban for their help in gathering and translating Polish and Ukrainian documents, and for putting me in touch with numerous Polish eyewitnesses to postwar events. I could never have understood the intricacies of the Czech and Slovak sources without the assistance of Michaela Anderlova, Martina Horackova and Dasha Conolly; and Alexandra Sherley was a godsend when it came to translating Croatian documents. My attempt to struggle through Italian, French and German source material was greatly eased by Jennie Condell, John Conolly and my multilingual sisters Natalie and Sarah. My mother-in-law, Zsuzsi Messing, also worked tirelessly translating huge passages of Hungarian books and documents.